Carcinogen turns up in drinks, again

Problem the FDA and the beverage industry kept from the public 16 years ago is back

DAVID GOLDSTEIN, Knight Ridder Tribune News

Published 6:30 am, Saturday, March 4, 2006

WASHINGTON - When small amounts of benzene, a known cancer-causing chemical, were found in some soft drinks 16 years ago, the Food and Drug Administration never told the public.

That's because the beverage industry told the government it would handle the problem and the FDA thought the problem was solved.

A decade and a half later, benzene has turned up again. The FDA has found levels in soft drinks higher than what it found in 1990, and two to four times higher than what's considered safe for drinking water.

Both the FDA and the beverage industry said the amounts were small and that the problem didn't appear to be widespread.

"People shouldn't overreact," said Kevin Keane, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association. "It's a very small number of products and not major brands."

"The issue here is not something that should cause anyone alarm or terrific concern," said George Pauli, a top food safety expert at the FDA, "but if there's something that can be reduced, we want to reduce it."

Neither Keane nor Pauli would identify the drinks being tested because the investigation is still under way.

Pauli said that people ingest more benzene by breathing than they would if they drank a can of soda containing the chemical. Small amounts of the chemical also are naturally present in some foods such as fruits, vegetables and dairy products.

Still, Pauli added, "You want to avoid it in any degree you can."

Of the 60 or so varieties of sodas, sports drinks, juice drinks and bottled waters that the FDA has tested so far, benzene levels have ranged from two and three parts per billion to more than 10-20 parts per billion.

The Environmental Protection Agency's safety standard for benzene in drinking water is five parts per billion. If it exceeds that, authorities are required to notify the public.

Keane said it was "tough to compare" the safety standard for water with soft drinks because the water rule is based on the fact that people drink more water each day.

A health safety watchdog organization said the FDA should inform the public, particularly since so many soft drinks are marketed to children.

"Most people would prefer there are no known human carcinogens in what they drink," said Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, nonpartisan scientific research group that studies toxic chemicals. "This is a case where industry agreed to get it out of the products, and all the evidence says they didn't."

Soft drink manufacturers PepsiCo and Coca-Cola declined to comment and referred calls to the American Beverage Association.When benzene first turned up, FDA officials met with representatives of the beverage industry who "expressed their concern about the presence of benzene traces in their products and the potential for adverse publicity associated with this problem," according to an internal FDA memo from 1990.